The Last Storyteller (30 page)

We had one of those days when spring peeps in at us, weeks ahead of time. Venetia reacted to it with smiles—how could she not? The early daffodils, the primroses on the grassy verges, the buds, the lambs, all the lovely clichés came to meet us.

Never have I observed a human being so closely. I managed to angle the rearview mirror so I could see most of the road and much of her face. In those days the journey took between three and four hours; twenty miles out of Dublin, Venetia finally sat back and released her shoulders into the seat.

Though now lacking sleep over several nights, I had massive energy. In my insomniac mind I’d planned every mile of this road. As a man trying to recapture a wonderful past, I had much to help me.

Venetia had loved the road. In this dwelt an irony, because she’d been forced to build the road show when her famed but jealous mother elbowed Venetia out of a star place in the Abbey Theatre. Sarah had once
triumphed in all the roles that went on to showcase Venetia, and people with long memories—meaning, in Ireland, everybody—never felt shy of saying that the daughter was outshining the mother.

Once Venetia had taken to the road, though—with as rag, tag, and bobtail a company as was ever assembled—she loved it. And every town and village held some kind of likable memory for her. Indeed, in the weeks before she was kidnapped, we’d been planning a new kind of company, an upgraded, less rackety show.

“More Shakespeare than shaky,” she called it. She had a passion to introduce the best of classical theater to the worst venues. Meaning she wanted to play the places least likely ever to see such drama. We couldn’t afford to visit town and city theaters, and Venetia believed that Shakespeare’s groundlings were alive and well in the Irish provinces.

In the car on that glorious sunny day, the Venetia I had known began to return. We drove through the village of Rathcoole.

“Remember?” I said to her.

“Wasn’t this the place where Peter came onstage blind drunk? And forgot he was supposed to be in character?”

She began to laugh.

“And he made a speech.” I could see it clear as day. “He said that the Irish loved Shakespeare because Shakespeare was a Catholic.”

“Not just a Catholic,” Venetia said, and did a perfect impersonation of Peter slurring his words: “A secret Catholic.”

It happened so fast. Children, I’m sure you must have seen those short pieces of film where they speed up a flower unfolding. That’s how I remember that morning: your mother came racing out of that tight bud, that emotional bandage. And soon, sitting beside me, I found the sweet, dancing girl I had missed for so long.

I wrote in my journal that night:

A memory—from today; every time I read this entry I will savor it. We reached Kildare sometime before noon. Not a cloud in the sky. Venetia looked all around her, in every direction, like a child
.

Venetia asked, “Is this the town where you told me a legend about a saint?”

I repeated it: Brigid, a holy woman, wanted to found a convent; she asked a rich pagan man for some of his land. He scoffed, told her that she
could have as much land as her cloak would cover. Brigid lowered the heavy cloak from her shoulders, laid it on the ground, “and it spread and it spread and it spread, for acres and acres and acres.”

Back then, Venetia had clapped her hands in delight.

“That’s a perfect image for loving,” she’d exclaimed. “It just spreads and spreads and spreads.” Today she said, “Lovely metaphor.” She didn’t say for what. But this was the old Venetia. Who came forth even more. As we passed an old ruin, she asked, “Weren’t our lives filled with castles,

Ben?”

We halted for lunch in Mountrath. Venetia took my arm as we crossed the street. In the absence of a worthwhile hotel, I chose a bed-and-breakfast that also served meals, run by a Mrs. Dennehy, who had the gift of tact.

We ate well, the standard Irish lunch of meat and potatoes, followed by a deep apple tart. Farmers came here, and commercial travelers, and one or two schoolchildren. As we finished, something pleasing happened.

A woman in her forties, dressed like a farmwife who was spending the day in town, had been trying not to stare at us. She had a daughter with her, aged twelve or so, in a school uniform. The mother, with a huge mop of hair, came by our table and, shy as a panda, said to Venetia, “Excuse me, but didn’t I see you in plays, in a show, here in Mountrath a long time ago?”

Venetia looked at me and looked at the woman. “You might have.”

The woman said, “Oh, you were marvelous. I hope you’ll come round again—I never forgot you, you were so lovely and clear. We were doing that old Shakespeare in school, and I never understood a word of it until I heard you say it.” And then, in the manner of all shy people who have suddenly spoken in a burst, she ran off. The daughter, not at all as withdrawn, said, “Will you be doing it again here soon? ’Cause we’ll all buy
tickets.” Then she thrust forth a school jotter she’d hauled from her satchel and asked, “Can I have your autograph, please?”

Venetia smiled and signed, “Best wishes, Venetia Kelly.” And she did it in long, clearly legible letters, not her usual scrawl; the old kindnesses hadn’t deserted her.

Jimmy Bermingham could not have been coarser.

“Shite’s sake, Ben, is this her? I was expecting a young one.”

Venetia looked at him, her face shrieking disgust. He was waiting in the hallway of the hospital, wearing a mauve shirt, nylon and cheap, and a tie with red clocks on it: What was Jimmy’s obsession with clocks? Did he use them to make bombs? I should have asked him.

Trying to get over his gaffe, he said to Venetia, “This man here, he saved my life, my actual life, and nearly got himself drowned doing it—isn’t that right, Ben?”

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I had pneumonia,” he said. “On the double. And I got pleurisy. And every shaggin’ disease from here to Timbuktu. I had the shakes for three weeks, and I have enough penicillin in me to feed a greyhound.” Jimmy’s similes and metaphors didn’t always mesh. He turned his attention to Venetia. “D’you know what, girl? This fella here, he’s only mad about you; he talks about you as if the sun was shining out of your you-know-where.” The trouble with this remark was its ambiguity.

I said, “Jimmy, where are we going?”

After he’d directed me, he sat in the back of the car and talked nonstop. From time to time he leaned forward and asked Venetia a question. She never answered. She had disappeared again; I could have throttled Jimmy in his cheap brown striped suit, with his nonstop chatter.

Near Birdhill, we turned left and the Shannon hove into view beneath us. Jimmy fell silent, looking at the river that had come close to taking his life. And mine. Eventually he said, “Christ Almighty.”

I said, “Is that a prayer or a swear?”

He patted me on the shoulder. “Ben, you’re some man, d’you know that?”

Venetia might not have been in the car.

He directed me to a cottage and told me, “We’ll say goodbye here.”

Venetia neither spoke nor looked at him as he wished her well. Standing in the road beside me, he said, “Well, Ben, your life is fixed and mine isn’t.”

“Yours can be fixed,” I said.

“How so?”

“Go and stay in Randall’s house.” I meant it well; I meant it for him—but my vile ulterior motive must have been lurking somewhere.

As I traveled the countryside, I’d always had a significant advantage: extra money. I’d never had to depend on the government salary. Just as well; my life would have been much more miserable. It’s easy to see why James had needed to gamble.

My financial independence began the night they kidnapped Venetia. They left behind a suitcase of her cash, probably in some half-baked attempt to appease me. Or, more likely, they meant to come back for it. With this money Venetia and I had intended to form our new, more powerful, much classier touring show. I hid the cash and then invested it.

Later, when my life settled and I took to the road as a collector, I used my investment as the compensation it felt like. It afforded me access to every hotel in the country, in case I hit nightfall with no bed for the night. I’d had enough of the barns, the sheds, the damp itinerant-workers’ mattresses that I’d known in those self-imposed bad years of my twenties.

With Jimmy Bermingham gone, we went to Cruise’s Hotel in Limerick. I knew it well. So many Irish hostelries had twilight lives—wee-small-hours drinkers, all-night card games, nervy local whores.
Cruise’s had none of that, but it did have tourists coming in off late flights into Rineanna (now Shannon) and, therefore, night porters. All of whom I knew. We got a room without difficulty.

Two quiet, awkward days we stayed there, leavened only by the fact that Venetia’s appetite for food hadn’t diminished, and that she felt easy enough for me to take her shopping.

Of the more relaxed woman in the car on the drive down—no trace. We did talk, though. We had difficult talks that followed a distressing pattern. Here’s a sample:

“Ben, when you didn’t come to look for me—that was irresponsible. Uncaring.”

“Venetia, I thought you were dead.”

“How could you think I was dead? I sent you five telegrams. And letters and cards.”

“I never got them.”

True; and when eventually, one day, I asked my parents, Mother quit the room without a word.

And so, round and round and round Venetia and I went, in the same circle of accusation and defense.

“But I would have walked away from that beach in Florida that day with you—I’d long planned it; I’d have managed to get the twins later—that’s what I had always hoped for.”

“Venetia, I was too immature.”

Children, here’s an official statement—from your father, Ben MacCarthy. Looking Back on His Life. I was now sick of myself and my past. All that moping, all that self-pity, that hesitancy, that indecisiveness, that talent for being led around the world by the nose, that failure—no, that refusal; call it what it is—to stand up for myself, that moral and emotional cowardice: how I must have bored the world to tears. And by now
I’ve probably bored you with it, too. I doubt that there could have been a more unattractive or stupidly pitiable man on the planet earth.

There are times when, in all the English language, the word I most appreciate is “but.” Here it comes: But—I was improving. And I knew it. I ran through my mind a quick list of my “accomplishments.”

Worked at a job I loved; survived a war’s deep horrors; and in the deep snow of that war killed a man trying to kill me and the person I was protecting; found a matchmaker her dear match; and, most recently, saw my beloved friend, James Clare, into his Valhalla—wherever it was—with no panic or collapse from me. Plus: saved a dubious friend from drowning. (Well, anyone would save anybody else, wouldn’t they?) And then essentially kidnapped, rescued from her cruel world, the love of my life. All that must count for something. So I said to Venetia, “From now on it will get better. Watch. And believe.”

“How?” she asked, sad, afraid, and acerbic.

I said, “We’re going to see a truly wonderful man.”

Unlike most people—put off from the medium by the fear of bad news—John Jacob O’Neill liked to receive telegrams.

“I enjoy their vitality,” he told me. “It would be a poor world if we shunned urgency.”

And so, when I wished to visit him, I usually sent a telegram, a day or two in advance. Our relationship had become relaxed. If I called and he didn’t answer the door and couldn’t be seen in the garden or strolling his lane, which he so loved—he called it his “entry point into the wide world”—I came back later. Or the next day. Or dropped a note through the neat brass slot in his door, saying I’d be back soon.

Now, from the Limerick post office, I telegraphed, “Would Thursday suit? May I bring my wife?”

Although I loved using the term, it still felt hollow—a shallow ownership, something to which I was holding on for grim life. Indeed, it had
crossed my mind that, when matters had settled, Venetia and I should undertake a new marriage ceremony to give ourselves fresh emotional muscle. We could do so in a Catholic church, since her divorce from me in Reno and her marriage to Jack Stirling, in an American registry office, would not be recognized as legal in Ireland. Technically, the church saw her as never having been married to him.

In the hours that I lay awake beside her (she, miraculously to me, slept soundly every night), I planned every mile of the journey to John Jacob’s strong farmer’s house. In Limerick, we were within twenty miles or so of Charleville, the town where we’d met, and whose surrounding woodland and countryside I had searched with spade and shovel for years.

Though it was still a place of great pain for me, might I not now anneal that anguish? After all, she and I had spent formative days and weeks in that area, talking to horses across fences, dawdling on the banks of small rivers, gathering armfuls of meadow flowers in those idyllic married months of 1932.

What were the risks? She had been taken from there with force—she hadn’t yet given me the details—but we’d had such glorious days in that peerless land of milk and honey. All her troubles had begun and congealed there; but she’d conceived you, her twins, there and had been loved, according to her own admission, as she’d always hoped to be.

“It’s astounding,” she’d said to me once, “that a boy of eighteen who has never had a girlfriend, never even kissed a girl, could arrive as so complete a lover.”

I’d joked about reincarnation, and she’d agreed.

When I surveyed and balanced every thought, I came down on the side of touring the old haunts. I could always quit them in a hurry should their memories prove too stressful, and then I could take some time to calm Venetia again.

We left Limerick in midmorning, and the hope in my heart shone as bright as the sun. She saw the road signs and made no comment, and I felt that she sat up a little straighter in the seat beside me. At breakfast she’d again had little to say, had made almost no response to my various attempts at conversation. One piece of communication worked: when I pressed a hand to her cheek, she caught my hand and held it there.